Flex News Desk
AJAX World - Two Great PDF Creators
Do you want to turn all you documents/bills/photos into PDF files?
May. 28, 2008 10:15 PM
I like reading stuff in the pdf format. But it’s even better if you
can easily create pdf files. By easily I mean a button click.
Literally.Since I have Adobe Acrobat, my Microsoft Word and PowerPoint
just have an extra menu to create it. But it’s kinda boring. Let me
share with you a couple of better ways.
1. Last year I
purchased a USB device from Fujitsu called ScanSnap S510. It’s one of
the coolest widgets I have. Just put any sheet of paper, single or
double sided, a photo, color or black and white. Press a large green
button, and select a directory where to save your pdf file.
2.
Last week I got to know an Internet service that allows to converts
most of the files and Web site into a pdf file. Just go to
PDF Converter's site and select a file or a Web site, and in
several seconds you’ll get it as a PDF. This is a software as service
deal. If you do not want to pay for it, you’ll have a very modest
limitation – one conversion per 30 minutes. But if you are an
established person or business, pay several bucks a month an do as many
conversions as you like. An interesting thing that I noticed is that
this software produces smaller pdf files than Adobe’s original
converter. It can convert into pdf lots and lots of file formats (yes
it knows how to work with your Excel spreadsheets too).
I have
only minor complain - if a Web page has Flash Player parts, you’ll see
empty rectangles there. But creators of the PDF converter ensured me that
SWF conversion will be complete too in a months or so. But overall, this is a really
handy tool.
Needless to say that PDF docs look a lot more professionally than essays written in MS Word or Notepad.
How do you present your documents? Do you think they look OK without converting them to PDF? Big mistake.Huge.
About Yakov FainYakov Fain is a managing principal of Farata Systems, consulting, training and product company. He has authored several Java books, dozens of technical articles. SYS-CON Books released his latest co-authored book , "Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters" in Spring 2007. Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Yakov with the title Java Champion. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group. He is an Adobe Certified Flex Instructor. Currently Yakov works on the book for O'Reilly "Enterprise Application Development with Flex".